Ever wondered exactly what you have to do with your penis to be charged with indecent exposure in Virginia? Need to know what sort of aperture you have to be looking through in order to be convicted of peeping? The Washington Post is here to help!

Last week, 29-year-old Eric Williamson was charged with indecent exposure after “a woman and her 7-year-old son walked by his Springfield house and saw him, through the window, naked.” The woman claims she was walking her son to school one morning when Williamson presented his naked body to her not once, but twice—first “standing nude in the doorway, ” and then “through a large window that appeared to have no drapes.” She called the police.

Williamson concedes that he was hanging out naked in his house, but denies that he intentionally exposed himself to the woman and the boy. The police response, Williams says, was extreme. “All of a sudden, I get woken up by police officers, and this guy has a Taser gun in my face,” he said. “I’m freaking out. Is this a movie? A horrible dream?” He called Fox News.

The incident has courted international attention to Virginia’s indecent exposure and peeping laws. In a Washington Post online chat yesterday, Fairfax attorney Atchuthan Sriskandarajah administered a quick legal lesson on the peculiarities of Virginia’s sex statutes. Can a person indecently expose themselves from the privacy of their own home? By the same token, can passersby who happen to spy a naked person through the window be charged with peeping?

According to Sriskandarajah, indecent exposure must require three elements:

* Exposure. Displaying your private parts (breast-feeding doesn’t count).

* Intent. The question that plagued the Justin Timberlake-Janet Jackson Superbowl flap.

* Obscenity. The nudity must be accompanied by an obscene act to be considered “indecent.”

In Virginia, a person can be convicted of indecent exposure even if the exposure occurred inside their own home—as long as they got naked, deliberately revealed that nudity to passersby, and, like, grabbed their genitals or something.

Virginia’s “peeping” statute also contains three major elements:

* Secrecy. No matter where you’re peeping, the peep must be “secret or furtive”—the naked person can’t be aware you’re looking at him or her.

* Residential peeping. In order to prove you’ve peeped into someone’s home, you gotta peep through something. The statute lists windows, doors, apertures, holes, cracks, or any “other similar opening through which a person can see” as acceptable peepholes.

* Commercial peeping. If the peeping is occurring outside a residence—like in a “restroom, dressing room, locker room, hotel room, motel room, tanning bed, tanning booth, [or] bedroom”—you still gotta peep through cracks and holes. But this time, you gotta be seeing something naked. According to the statute, that includes “the purpose of viewing any nonconsenting person who is totally nude, clad in undergarments, or in a state of undress exposing the genitals, pubic area, buttocks or female breast.”

Photo by rick, Creative Commons License.

In an editorial slide-show titled Lindsay Lohan: A Metamorphosis, the Washington Post’s Liz Kelly revisits the many looks the 23-year-old starlet has cultivates over the years. But this is no style retrospective treatment, a la Madonna’s chameleon-like fashion choices or Tyra’s wacky wigs. This slide-show is focused exclusively on each stage of Lohan’s career, and whether or not she looked ugly in it!

Let’s see how Kelly rates Lohan’s attractiveness over the past five years:

2004: “Channeling a bit of Britney Spears’s ‘little girl gone bad’ mojo.”

2005: “Bleach blond”; “rapidly shrinking frame”; “eating disorder”; “possible drug abuse.”

2006: “Apparently at a healthier weight”; “curvy, brunette.”

2007: “Healthy-ish.”

2009: “Bathing suit-clad”; “victim of her own Sevin Nyne brand tanning mist”; “a blond, haggard Lohan.”

Lohan is a celebrity, and part of being a celebrity is having your appearance intensely scrutinized by gossip columnists. Still, why is the Washington Post devoting editorial space on its front page that can be reduced to one catty Hollywood insult—Lohan looks “haggard”?

According to the slideshow’s introduction, the product was an exercise in edginess. It reads, “Lindsay Lohan has been, dare we say it, looking a bit rough of late. Maybe it’s the bleached hair or the fake tan, but it’s getting harder to remember that Lohan is only 23.” Apparently, publishing a fluffy celebrity slide-show filled with Perez Hilton-ready body-snarking now constitutes a “daring” editorial decision.

Actually, expressing that women look old, unattractive, unhealthy, too fat, too thin, or too blond is pretty much par for the course, as far as media coverage of women’s bodies are concerned. The Post’s celebrity sensibilities are actually beginning to wear a bit—dare I say it?—old.

Last week, two stories on the Washington Post’s gender treatment for a couple of transgender shoplifting suspects (Washington Post Cross-Dressing Shoplifting Story Misfires; Transgender Shoplifting Story’s Absurd Corrections) inspired confusion, transphobia, and some helpful commentary!

The story: A couple of transgender women are caught shoplifting, and end up being shot by police after a botched getaway. In a medical examination, the suspects are revealed to have male genitalia. So: The Post first reported that the suspects were women, then reported that they were cross-dressing men, and finally issued a vague clarification that the suspects were still men dressed as women, but “were not in disguise.” Was the Post’s treatment insensitive? Incorrect? Or the lone crusader for truth in a PC world?

Carisa Cunningham appreciates the teaching moment:

I don’t think we can just expect mainstream journalists, even those with good intentions, to know what to do, how to look at this, the correct terminology to use, etc,about what to them is unfamiliar territory if we don’t take the responsibility to reach out to them. An event like this is an opportunity for GLAAD, for example, to connect with Mr. Weil about terminology and about transgender issues generally. I accept at face value his explanations and would approach him in the same good faith. The world doesn’t change otherwise.

While TJ wants an apology:

The first thing that I thought about the article was, “That’s nice that you cleared it up.” But then I had this question: was this supposed to be a retraction of some sort? I understand that these two women are criminals, but were they issued some sort of apology? Clearly they considered themselves female based on what Renee Bailey said. And with names like Renee Bailey and Kelly Bright, how in the world would the police or anyone else think that these are men? WTF!

And william thinks that people with “confused sexuality” will naturally confuse others:

While confused sexuality may not be mysterious to those who identify as transgender—it is highly confusing to many others, including police. Give them, and the media a break. I happen to have personally met one of these suspects and can tell you “she” is living as a woman but physically appears to be very, very male. I left the meeting pretty confused myself and would have to consult an expert to properly categorize this person.

Gregory A Butler writes:

Cut out the politically correct bullshit—these were men in dresses. They may have had a mental delusion that they were “women”—but they had penises, and testicles, and Y chromosomes, and that makes them MEN, no matter how many skirts or wigs they put on!

Julia writes:

Thank you for writing this. The distinction between sex and gender is one that far too few people recognize, but you’d hope that major media outlets would at least try to get it right (it doesn’t take much research to see that cross-dressing isn’t the same as being transgendered). If they don’t, they deserve to be called out on it. And the fact that they can get it wrong probably means that the general public doesn’t have a good grasp of the issue either, which makes your detailed explanation all the more important.

Much ado ’bout nothing thinks we should all understand “the news biz” (instead of transgender people):

Shoplifters get caught is not news. Shoplifters get shot IS news. And so, when the police identify the shoplifters as female, and they turn out to have penises, that’s something that “advances the story,” as they say in the news biz. Not a correction, but a new fresh lede for the story. That’s how the news biz works.

The news biz, Amanda. Learn about it. It can help you gain perspective.

Matt C is afraid that these transgender women are suffering from our gender stereotyping:

What defines a female? Is it the type of clothes a person wears? Is it the type of general interests a person has? Or is it even the choice in sexual partners one prefers?

If you answered No (like I do) to the above questions then it would stand to reason that a man could share these same characteristics and still be considered a man.

Why then do some feel the need to ignore fact and incorrectly label either themselves or others with a stereotypical “gender identity” that defines ones sex by the way they dress & behave rather than their biological fact.

I applaud the Washington Post for getting the facts correct on this story and not letting political correctness cloud the truth.

While Gregory A Butler is back to clarify one point: Transgender women must choose between being referred to as women, and getting shot—or being called men, and not getting shot. Makes sense!:

Also, the real issue here is being lost.

These guys (and that’s what they are – GUYS) were Shot For Stealing A Dress.

That’s the REAL issue here – not what pronouns the Washington Post’s crime reporter uses!

I’m sure if you called these men “he” but Didn’t Shoot Them, they would prefer that to being called “she” and being shot over a dress!

This is one of the main reasons why Political Correctness is so destructive!

Illustration by Bonnie Kennedy

NBC Washington shows what happens when news outlets fail to confirm the correct gender identity of their subjects before publication. The outlet has just posted another story about the two shoplifting suspects who were shot by police near the University of Maryland last Friday. Here’s the absurd lede:

Upon closer review, it appears two shoplifting suspects shot by a Prince George’s County police officer weren’t men, as originally reported, or cross-dressers, as was later reported, but transgender women.

The third time is the charm for NBC, who took four days to get the gender identity of the suspects right. NBC does one better on the Washington Post, at least. The Post first reported that the suspects were women, then reported that they were cross-dressing men, and finally issued the vague and misleading clarification that they were men dressed as women who “were not in disguise.”

Apparently, the paper has an aversion to just calling the suspects “transgender women.” Interestingly enough, the Post’s first iteration—”women”—would have worked just fine. Martin Weil, the Post reporter who wrote the second story on the suspects—the one outing them as “men”—said in an interview that the paper decided to run the story in order to stay competitive with the television news outlets that had reported the suspects’ sex as “male.”“The police had informed us that the suspects appeared to be men wearing women’s clothing, and we didn’t know too much more about any of the details,” says Weil. “We posted that story on the web so as not to look as if we were totally unaware of the unusual circumstances.”

Weil adds that the original story, which identified the suspects simply as “women,” risked inspiring some gender-related confusion of its own. “When you’re writing about women criminals in the newspaper, it behooves you to be extremely careful, because it alters people’s perceptions of the world,” he says. “When you read about a woman seemingly recklessly dragging a police officer, you get an unusual impression of the range of behaviors that are possible. And maybe it’s an accurate impression. But if it’s not an accurate one, I wanted to correct that in any way that was possible. So I decided, in a burst of enthusiasm, to post that item on the Web early Sunday morning.”

Beyond Weil’s enthusiasm for accuracy, the fact remains that “cross-dressing” shoplifters make for more sensational crime suspects than even women do. While women aren’t generally seen as criminals, transgender women are often cast in the public eye as fakers, predators, and criminals against humanity—shoplifters or not. Weil says he never meant to capitalize upon the “man in a dress” punchline. “The last intention I had was the demonization of anyone, of any gender, or transgender either,” he says. “I just never thought at the time that they could be transgender. I assumed they must be people in disguise, or people who happen to prefer that mode of dress.”

Illustration by Bonnie Kennedy

“Last week, I was over at a friend’s house, and he showed me a picture on Facebook of a girl I used to” date, Thomas said.

Woah! Isn’t it interesting how expertly Shapira snipped that quote juuuust before Thomas was about to describe, in his own words, what he “used to” do with that girl on Facebook?

Sure, Thomas didn’t necessarily employ an R-rated term for his former fling. He could have thrown out a euphemism for dating that didn’t really translate in copy: “a girl I used to hang out with”; “a girl I used to see”; “a girl I used to know.” Maybe Shapira was simply correcting for Thomas’ loquaciousness: “a girl I used to kinda, like, take out or whatever, sometimes.” Perhaps Shapira and Thomas are so close, they just finish one another’s sentences!

But when Shapira steps in to insert a Post-approved relationship term in an otherwise full quote, it sure makes it look like Thomas had filled in the blank with “a girl I used to bone,” “a girl I used to bang,” or “a girl I used to fuck.” If Thomas’ terminology hadn’t raised a red flag, why bother butchering the quote right in the middle of the verb?

I have an e-mail out to Shapira asking whether Thomas’ description of his relationship was too hot for the Post’s standards of decency. I’m trying to hunt down Thomas, but dude’s not on Facebook, so if you’re one of those friends who acts as his personal Internet secretary, let him know I’d like a word. Preferably a naughty one!

I was really impressed that the Post chose to ask its seven resident football bloggers this question: Should football cheerleading squads be disbanded because they are a misogynist tradition? But then the bloggers were all like: “Nope!”

First, Sarah Schorno is like, STFU you guys cheerleaders are pretty: “You can take the ‘it’s degrading to women’ and ‘it’s inappropriate for children’ arguments and shove it.”

And then Dan Levy is all, seriously? “I honestly can’t believe we are having this conversation,” he writes. (Me neither!) “And before people get all ‘oh my gosh you’re such a misogynist’ on me, let me be perfectly clear on one thing. . . you’re over-reacting.”

And then Brandon Benson goes, you can’t get rid of cheerleaders, because porn: “I admit that I always watch the gratuitous shot of a cheerleader as the network comes back from a commercial break. I admit to lingering over the cheerleader pictures posted on many NFL websites, and watching glimpses of various cheerleader tryouts on the NFL Network.”

And then Adam Tracey is all, DUH it can’t be misogynistic because it’s for men not women: “Yes women and kids watch football, but let’s face it; football’s main demographic is guys. We like football, we like beer and we like cheerleaders.”

And theeeeen, Dawn Knight goes, “I’m sure there are people out there who would want me to bring up the whole women- shouldn’t-be-objectified argument,” but then she TOTALLY DOESN’T BRING THAT UP, and instead says that a lot of cheerleaders are really nice ladies, and she’s “glad times have changed enough to look beyond the short skirts” . . . that we still make the cheerleaders wear. (Is your brain exploding? Mine is too!)

So then finally, Dan Parker is like, okay it’s misogynistic, but I’m going to put “misogynistic” in quotes because it’s not really: “the league could do well to get rid of cheerleaders in an effort to perhaps make the games seem less ‘misogynistic’ toward female viewers. ”

Parker’s opinion is poorly received:

Well, it’s been fun, Washington Post’s The League! Thanks for having this really productive chat about misogyny! Next time, homophobia?

On Wednesday, Aug. 26, one person was killed and another critically injured in a daytime stabbing outside 209 Q St. NW. In the hours following the homicide, police and reporters gathered witness testimony, formed a description of the suspect, and chased likely motives. This time, cops and journalists were also forced to devote resources to another developing story: the gender of the victims.

Within three hours of the incident, three local news sources had independently verified the victims’ gender identity with police. They all got it wrong.

Fox 5 news reporter Roby Chavez gave this report at 3:59 p.m., about an hour and a half after the stabbings occurred. “D.C. Police sources tell Fox  5 officers found two transgender male victims in front of the building when they arrived,” Chavez reported.

At 4:36 p.m., the Washington Post’s Paul Duggan filed his item on the stabbing, also published in the next day’s paper. “Police said the victims, whom they described as ‘transgender males,’ were stabbed shortly after 2:30 p.m. in the 200 block of Q Street NW.”

WUSA9’s Bill Starks weighed in at 5:23 p.m.: “Officers…arrived and found two transgender males in front of the building at 209 Q Street, both suffering from stab wounds.”

The Washington Blade’s Lou Chibbaro was the first to nail down the correct gender identity of the homicide victim, who has since been identified under her legal name, Joshua Mack, as well as her chosen name, Tyli’a. At 7:06 p.m., four-and-a-half hours after the incident occurred, Chibbaro wrote, “One transgender woman was stabbed to death Wednesday and another was in stable condition with stab wounds from an unknown assailant.”

But even after Mack’s correct gender identity was established, the struggle continued. In “D.C. Transgender Community Outraged After Fatal Stabbing”—filed more than 24 hours after the incident occurred—ABC 7 reporter Sam Ford announced: “One transgender is dead, another is in critical condition.”

Mack was not a “transgender male,” a “transgender man,” or a “transgender.” Mack was a male-to-female transgender woman who clearly appeared to be female. On the reward poster for her homicide, she’s shown wearing eye shadow, shaped eyebrows, and two long braids. “Of course, when the one young lady was murdered and the other was hospitalized, we were quite upset [with the media coverage] because they aren’t transgender men—they are transgender women,” says Brian Watson, the director of Transgender Health Empowerment, which counted both victims as clients. “I know both of the young ladies that were attacked, and they lived their lives as transgender women. They looked like women. For me, there shouldn’t have been any confusion about them being males. If you saw them on the street, you would see they were females.”

Since the victims in this case clearly presented as women, how were they initially identified as “transgender males”?

Chavez, Duggan, and Starks all attributed the “transgender males” identification to “police sources.” Duggan says that the department’s public information office provided him the term. “The police department put it out there, and we went on what they said,” says Duggan. Starks got even more specific, sourcing the terminology to Quintin Peterson, the public information officer on duty when news of the stabbings broke. “‘Transgender males’—those were his exact words,” says Starks. “I’m not trying to get him in trouble or anything, but that’s what was said.”

Peterson denies that the police originated the term. “‘Transgender males’ was never used. Not by me or anyone in this office,” he says. “We cannot be held responsible for the terminology the news media chooses to use. We did not put anything out other than what the correct terminology is.” Acting Lieutenant Brett Parson, the police department’s top liaison to the GLBT community who was on scene shortly following the stabbing, similarly defers the misidentification to media reports. “It’s the media that seems fixated on their gender identity. That issue did not come from the chief of police,” says Parson. “We’ve had to correct the media on countless occasions because they have been reporting, insensitively, terms that are not used in the community.”

Wherever the term “transgender males” originated, no one really wanted to touch it. Starks says he never asked Peterson for clarification on what the term “transgender males” actually meant. “I didn’t ask him to go beyond that,” he says. “I assumed that it was referring to a person who may be in the process of either a sex change or someone who is dressing in the clothing of another gender.” When asked if “male” refers to the victim’s biological sex or gender identity, Starks was stumped. “That’s a good question,” he says. Duggan says that the Post avoided parsing the term with a deft use of punctuation. “It was a short brief that we wrote really fast, so we decided to use, in quotes, ‘transgender males,’” says Duggan. “I got beat up a lot over that, because I wasn’t educated on [the terminology] at the time, and I was quickly educated on it.”

For cops and journos, employing the correct terminology is more than a matter of respect. Both D.C. police procedure and Associated Press style mandate that transgender individuals be addressed in accordance with their gender expression. According to the AP Stylebook, reporters are to “use the pronoun preferred by the individuals who have acquired the physical characteristics of the opposite sex or present themselves in a way that does not correspond with their sex at birth.” And in 2007, D.C. police adopted one of the nation’s most comprehensive transgender policies, which states that when a police officer is unsure of a person’s gender identity, “the member shall inquire how the individual wishes to be addressed (e.g., Sir, Miss, Ms.) and the name by which the individual wishes to be addressed.”

Of course, ascertaining the correct terminology becomes more difficult when the transgender individual is dead. Sometimes, even the victim’s family can’t help identify the preferred gender. ABC 7’s story on the stabbing included a quote from Mack’s brother, Aaron Walker: “I’m just hurting right now. My mom, she’s got 10 boys, and that’s one of my little brothers and for me to see him pass like that,” Walker said of Mack. (ABC 7 also misidentified Walker as “Aaron Hall,” proving that newsroom slip-ups are sometimes based in sloppiness, sometimes in ignorance).

In the event that a victim’s gender identity is unclear, sometimes it helps to do some reporting. Chibbaro took care to verify Mack’s gender identity with “sources both in the community and in law enforcement” before publishing his story, three hours after the first news of the stabbing hit. “This misidentification is not always the fault of police, or the press, or others—this is something that everyone is grappling with,” says Chibbaro. “The first concern that I have, and that I think the Washington Blade has, is whether the information is accurate.”

As the scene of the daylight stabbing grew dark, reporters set about correcting the terminology in their stories, abandoning “transgender males” for “transgender women” and swapping “he” for “she.” But for some members of the transgender community, the damage had already been done. “[S]ix hours and (at least) six edits later, we finally have gender appropriate language in an article based on a double homicide attempt that was clearly motivated by hatred and transphobia,” wrote one commenter on the Fox 5 story. “[I]’m saddened on so many levels.”

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

We had a rough set of criteria: the tutor had to be an exceptional speaker, had to be good with kids and had to have the kind of schedule where a year-long commitment wasn’t going to end the moment the schoolwork picked up.

It turns out there was also another — unspoken — requirement: the tutor ought to be a woman. This was something my wife and I both felt in our gut, even though I knew it made me a huge hypocrite.

Why no male educators in the Reid household? That’s another thing that Reid leaves “unspoken” throughout the piece, but the intent is clear: He’s afraid a male tutor would molest his daughter.

Reid lays out the issue:

it’s one thing to defend my days as an at-home dad and another to put an elementary-school girl alone with a college guy for hours a week. Yes, I know the risk is low, but why accept the risk at all?

Still, out of a sense of open-mindedness, we did interview a male tutor earlier this month. He was a lovely kid, well-spoken and polite, bearing a letter of reference from a parent who trusted him to teach her children — including her elementary-aged girl — to swim. While we haven’t talked to everyone on our list of candidates, there is no question that he’d make an excellent tutor. It is entirely possible that we’ll hire him, even though the idea still makes me uncomfortable.

I’m curious if any of you have had similar experiences. Is it fear-mongering of the worst sort to prevent this sort of one-on-one interaction, or is it a you-can-never-be-too-careful kind of thing?

Actually, this is worse than fear-mongering. It’s discrimination. As “open-minded” as Reid is, as much as he claims to believe that there’s “no reason why guys can’t do the childrearing thing as well as women,” his own fear of sexual predators effectively discriminates against male educators.  Even when Reid gets a real live man in front of him—a “lovely kid, well-spoken and polite”—he just can’t shake the idea that no matter how nice a particular man is, no matter how effective a teacher, no matter how appropriate and respectful and recommended he is, he is unfit to do his job because he is a man.

It’s heartbreaking for me to see Reid’s extreme discomfort with the fact that another parent allowed her young daughter to enter a swimming pool with a male teacher. It’s clear that Reid wants to protect his daughter from a parent’s worst nightmare, but his fears don’t justify discrimination. Reid’s particular flavor of prejudice—that against male educators—is wide-spread, of course, to the point that, as one commenter notes, male teachers often “exercise extreme caution and go out of their way to never be alone with students—male or female—because of the possibility of being accused of inappropriate conduct.”

Another commenter, who claims to be a victim of sexual abuse himself, makes the point very clearly:

Lets say you were a piano teacher, Spanish tutor or any other kind of teacher that had you teaching one-on-one with a young girl. You OK with not getting female students because you are male? If you think it is fine for others to discriminate against yourself because of your gender then at least you aren’t being a hypocrite. Perhaps that gives you some leeway in discriminating against others?

As the father of a young daughter, I hope Reid understands that employment discrimination obviously cuts both ways. Of course, Reid doesn’t have to hire just any man to tutor his daughter—the polite swim coach sounds as good an option as any, however. And if he isn’t comfortable leaving his daughter alone with a tutor for a couple hours a week—male or female—then all he has to do is stick around during the lesson. Hey, maybe he could pick up a little Spanish along the way.

According to historical Washington Post archives, August is a banner month for crazy bitches. But there’s a quick solution for any late-summer onset of the vapors, whether it’s from the heat, a cheatin’ man, or a too-full pocket book: oh, just throw her in the insane asylum! (The therapeutic pelvic massage comes later).

Diagnosis: It’s hot.

Remedy: Straightjacket.

Bitch, please: Mary Smith, “a domestic”—the Post doesn’t specify the breed—bites herself “in her frenzy.” Police respond by tying her arms to her body and throwing her in jail. Surely, whatever made this stay-at-home Virginia mom housekeeper nearly bite her own arms and hands off will subside once the humidity goes down, right? Make sure to keep her on the insta-asylum list for next August!

—

Diagnosis: Husband-killer.

Remedy: Explain it away as hysterical jealousy.

Bitch, please: Ah, I see that this man was the victiom of his wife’s “jealous rage” over allegations of “paying attention” to another woman, and so was slain. Typical. It’s almost enough to overlook the part where he jumps out of the car and slams his fist in her face for catching him with his male companion. Hmmm! But even if it was a domestic face-punching and not maaaddddness which prompted the woman to discharge the weapon, one thing’s for sure—if she wasn’t crazy before, she’s crazy now. Case closed.

—

Diagnosis: “Colored”

Remedy: Guess.

Bitch, please: These women were practically asking to be pronounced demented and filed in the “insane department.” After all, the three women were suspicious, “like the majority of their race,” and we all know that black women are just one herbal tea away from being a lifelong danger to themselves and others.

—

Diagnosis: Bitch has money.

Remedy: Yeah, yeah, commit her.

Bitch, please: Well, well, well. The truth comes out. It’s not too hard to illegally confine a fake crazy woman in an insane asylum after all! All she has to do is get drunk—or get too hot, or drink some tea—and it’s curtains for her! this woman is lucky enough to have a lawyer—she’s crazy because she’s rich, remember—who tries to make people give a shit that turn-of-the-century insane asylums were marked by “ill-treatment and cruelty.” The “aged colored woman” in our last story probably was not so lucky.

Earlier this month, John Aravosis’s praised the Washington Post for an op-ed supporting gay marriage—before quickly criticizing the paper for its incessant use of “homosexual” throughout the piece. In his indictment of the Post, Aravosis raises an interesting point about mainstream media coverage of shifting cultural attitudes. Even as a newspaper’s coverage tends towards the progressive—as is the case of the WaPo editorial—its commitment to formal style often keeps the discussion mired in the traditional.

To a seasoned Postie, “homosexual” might seem like a formal—even respectful—choice for your editorial endorsement of same-sex marriage rights. But as Aravosis points out, the usage is swiftly transitioning from “formal” to “archaic”—and is now dipping into “offensive.” “Homosexual,” to thoroughly modern ears, recalls a time when being gay was stigmatized as a type of psychosis—not the most flattering choice for your equal-rights essay.

In the newspaper business, however, stylistic tradition often lags far behind popular usage. But as reporters and editors strive to maintain style, Aravosis argues, they sometimes sacrifice objectivity. Even in WaPo’s gay-positive editorial, the use of “homosexual” aligns the paper with the rhetoric of far-right homophobes, and in opposition to the preferred usage of most gay men and women (that would be a simple “gay”).

As blogger Rex Wockner points out, the Washington Post has now proven itself more traditional than the leading authority on newspaper style—the Associate Press Stylebook. The Stylebook I’ve got lying around the office, published in 2000, defines “gay” as “acceptable as popular synonym for both male and female homosexuals.”

But the reference book has come a long way since 2000 (when, as a side-note, it had to remind journos not to upper-case the L in “lesbian”). According to this (admittedly dubious) resource, the AP Stylebook began to explicitly prefer “gay” over “homosexual” in its 2006 edition. “Homosexual” remains the preferred term “in clinical contexts or references to sexual activity”—but not in general reference to specific humans.

As long as the Post editorial board is publishing endorsements of same-sex marriage, it might be time for the paper to endorse “gay,” as well.

Why pay journalists to write about Sarah Palin when Sarah Palin is perfectly willing to pay people to write as if they were Sarah Palin? It’s almost too easy.

The Washington Post’s breakout Weddings section, “OnLove,” has debuted, providing Washingtonians with another outlet for more-of-the-same coverage of the institution. You’ve got your pair of interlocked golden rings illustrating the header; your bouquet-clutching, white-veiled bride gracing the front page; and your tales of everlasting love sparked in Dewey Beach spicing up the copy.

But WaPo’s weddings page is stepping out of the traditional mold in one way: It’s soliciting stories and photos of same-sex weddings and commitment ceremonies, as well.

The OnLove “Wedding Story” submission form requests deets from two parties: “Bride” or “Partner #1″ and “Groom” or “Partner #2.” Later, the form then reverts back to regular old bride-and-groom. And there’s no telling how seriously the Post will consider same-sex unions in its romanticized coverage: so far, the Post’s wedding page appears exclusively hetero.

Even if OnLove ends up covering enough gay weddings, it will probably end up covering way too many weddings, period. Although I’m not married, I can understand why a couple’s wedding is a very important moment in their lives. What I don’t understand is why that couple’s wedding is even a vaguely interesting moment in my life, however, unless something very horrific—death and destruction—or awesome—jet packs?—went down. If it’s just the same old white dresses, flowers, rings, and vows, that’s not newsworthy—that’s just a wedding. Happens every day.

Wedding news certainly isn’t the only fluff filling out the pages of the Washington Post. I realize that the “Arts & Living” section also devotes entire pages to glorifying our pets and critiquing celebrity fashion sense, as well. But while weddings may not be the least fit-to-print, they do manage to inspire the most predictable boilerplate feature coverage known to journalism.

Weddings, even same-sex ones, are about fulfilling tradition, after all—the whole story depends on the dresses, flowers, rings, and vows being there. In that world, even the tiniest breakings-of-tradition qualify as enduring details. We’re talking rose-colored wedding dresses and Vegas-themed receptions here, not a jet-pack experiment gone awry.

Wedding coverage may never go away, but I like to think, at least, that the idea of wedding reporting actually equating writing “on love” is beginning to erode. Wedding coverage is all about artifice. At least fashion reporting attacks the subject with a critical eye.

Now that WaPo is preparing to roll out this “Sports page for women,” perhaps it’s time we consider to what other seemingly gender-neutral activities have been crying out for a clearly feminine alternative all along.

A colleague of mine suggested a game: I name an area of interest relegated to the ladies, and you tell me what normal (or “male”) activity it corresponds to. When I say “hair salon“; you say, “gym, for women!” Ready?

1. High School Reunions: _______, for women!

2. Victoria’s Secret: _______, for women!

3. Cosmopolitan: _______, for women!

4. Anorexia: _______, for women!

5. Childbearing, cooking, and vacuuming: _______, for women!

Answers are after the jump.

Answer Key:

1. Scrabble

2. Home Depot

3. The Economist

4. Hunger

5. Careers

Yesterday, I hopped on a 90 Metrobus in the hopes of escaping the downpour. Little did I know that the unsuspecting bus I was boarding was actually an anti-abortion vehicle of shame!

The bus was wallpapered, front to back, on both sides, with this “FREE Abortion Alternatives” Ad, pictured. The ad, for a local crisis pregnancy center, offers free pregnancy tests, counseling, and “services” to pregnant women at four D.C.-area locations. Also on the menu: A good shaming! The woman’s numb, downturned face says it all: “You’re lost. You’re confused. You’re thinking about killing a tiny human. We can help.”

Go ahead, try to look away: You’ll still have to look at another identical forlorn future abortionist!

Blogger Kat of “This is Everything” boarded a shame bus last month (she also snapped the photo). “Ick,” she wrote. “[I] pondered whether it would even be worth it to get off the bus (I decided against it since I had already paid the fare.. they have my money so no big deal whether I’m on the bus for six more blocks or not).”

Crisis Pregnancy Centers have a well-documented history of preying on the vulnerable, misrepresenting their legitimacy (what are these “services”?), and passing anti-abortion rhetoric as medical advice. In other words, not exactly what the women of D.C. need.

I know Metro likes to go all-out with its advertisements. And hey, I don’t like being bombarded with Obama-themed Pepsi ads either. But the all-or-nothing approach can be a good thing—last January, it helped underpaid Washington Post post-production workers gain traction in their WashingtonPostUnfair.com campaign. And I’ve spied many Metro ads in the past encouraging D.C. citizens to get tested and treatment for HIV.

But when ad bombardments are targeted specifically on a captive audience of economically vulnerable women, they can be outright threatening. Kat writes: “I totally understand how crucial advertisements are as a form of revenue and financial support for WMATA . . . [but] ultimately I feel it is irresponsible of Metro to run ads for a company, foundation, or organization that deliberately jeopardizes women’s health through misinformation and lacks respect for their autonomy.”

Until the ads are replaced, Kat plans to voice her disapproval of the ad to WMATA. While I’m not sure this “Metro Customer Comment Form” will get us anywhere, you can give it a try here.

Photo via This is Everything.

On the U Street Listserv this morning, Washington Post Staff Writer Theola Labbé-DeBose solicits “ex wives and new wives who get along”:

Hi, for a potential Mother’s Day feature I’m looking for local Ex-wives and New wives who get along! The women should be able to talk freely about what it took to get their relationship on a positive note. If you or someone you know fits this bill, and they live in DC-MD-VA please reply to me at labbet@washpost.com.

Thanks,
Theola

Since the situation warrants an exclamation point, I’m betting this holiday-themed piece will have a good layer of bitchy female rivalry beneath its grinning facade. But wouldn’t a real Mother’s Day present from WaPo be a piece on chummy ex- and new husbands? Certainly there are just as many men in this situation as there are women. My suspicion is that WaPo wouldn’t find the stories of male rivalry sufficiently catty to warrant a piece. Or maybe WaPo’s just waiting until next month to roll that story out for Father’s Day?

Photo by Cosmic Kitty

That’s what Ruth Marcus claims in today’s Washington Post, quoting Sarah Palin’s remarks from a—what else—a pro-life fundraiser. At the dinner, Palin discussed her “choice” to have a child with Down syndrome  at the age of 44—a choice that, as Marcus points out, Palin wants to deny other women. Marcus is miffed that right-to-lifers like Palin routinely justify their anti-choice positions by describing their own “correct” “decisions” to have children. This isn’t the fist time Palin has used choice to explain why women shouldn’t chose—who could forget Palin’s election-season classic, “We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby”?

Palin’s pro-”choice” comments—where she describes twice considering abortion before deciding to carry her pregnancy to term—after the jump.

“I had found out that I was pregnant while out of state first, at an oil and gas conference. While out of state, there just for a fleeting moment, wow, I knew, nobody knows me here, nobody would ever know. I thought, wow, it is easy, could be easy to think, maybe, of trying to change the circumstances. No one would know. No one would ever know.

“Then when my amniocentesis results came back, showing what they called abnormalities. Oh, dear God, I knew, I had instantly an understanding for that fleeting moment why someone would believe it could seem possible to change those circumstances. Just make it all go away and get some normalcy back in life. Just take care of it. Because at the time only my doctor knew the results, Todd didn’t even know. No one would know. But I would know. First, I thought how in the world could we manage a change of this magnitude. I was a very busy governor with four busy kids and a husband with a job hundreds of miles away up on the North Slope oil fields. And, oh, the criticism that I knew was coming. Plus, I was old . . .

“So we went through some things a year ago that now lets me understand a woman’s, a girl’s temptation to maybe try to make it all go away if she has been influenced by society to believe that she’s not strong enough or smart enough or equipped enough or convenienced enough to make the choice to let the child live. I do understand what these women, what these girls go through in that thought process.”

Photo by √oхέƒx™

I’m tempted to sympathize with Will here: Some weeks, you’re just really hard up for a column. In this case, however, Will’s misuse of his cushy WaPo spot is too egregious not to mention. Will spends half his jeans essay rehashing Akst’s jeans essay, chortling along as he relives Ackst’s every turn. Will co-opts Akst’s argument that the blue jean, once decidedly working-class, has now become an expensive, obnoxious, and hypocritical mark of the American elite, who take pains to “slum it” in their unwashable designer jeans. Will then rehashes Akst’s SUV-to-the-Whole Foods joke, his McMansions joke, and his Steve Jobs joke.

Akst’s sartorial commentary, though as curmudgeonly as Will’s, works because Aksts sticks to elite subjects for his satirical ribbing. Now, more than ever, rich people who act extravagantly and decadently poor are ripe for criticism, even by fellow elites. When Akst writes, “Our fussily tailored blue jeans, prewashed and acid-treated to look not just old but even dirty, are really a sad disguise,” he’s making a social commentary—when even the richest men in the world are begging for government handouts, it’s important to remember that the rich are well-versed in acting like the poor when it suits their expensive tastes.

But when Will finally forges ahead with his own ideas as to why denim is so terrible, he ditches Akst’s class argument. From there, things get much, much, worse.

It’s not just the rich who wear denim who deserve Will’s scorn—no, Will hates poor people who wear denim, too. When he goes on to call jeans the “infantile uniform of a nation,” he sneers at all those pathetic, lower-class Americans who will never rise to the occasion of sporting an anal bow tie and smug grin in promotional photos for their bloviating Republican columns. With jeans-wearers he also tears down grown-ups who watch sitcoms, cartoons, and Indiana Jones movies (two of the three television shows made Time’s list of the “Best Television Shows of All Time,” which I suppose is only impressive for those heathens who actually watch television), and also anyone who wears anything not sported by Fred Astaire (seriously).

Will isn’t pissed at the rich for their hypocritical adaptation of the fashions of the working class. He’s pissed at the rich for not looking rich enough, and at the poor for not being rich. Will’s essay is a call-to-arms for the rich to flaunt their wealth in tailored suits and real, full-sized mansions.

The only worthwhile flourish in Will’s condescension-layered WSJ expectoration is the postscript:

(A confession: The author owns one pair of jeans. Wore them once. Had to. Such was the dress code for former senator Jack Danforth’s 70th birthday party, where Jerry Jeff Walker sang his classic “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.” Music for a jeans-wearing crowd.)

Now this—beyond being a thinly-veiled, name-dropping kiss on the ass to Jack Danforth—is interesting. If only Will had devoted his essay to this one incident, the near 1,000 comments on the Washington Post Wen site wouldn’t all be calling for Will’s resignation. Please, George: Tell us how the denim bristled unnaturally against your leg hairs in the Saks fitting room! Describe how you carefully belted the pair over a crisp Oxford shirt! Regale us with details of that infamous night, when George F. Will, swathed in Mom Jeans, rocked self-consciously to the backwoods music of redneck country, one hand cradling a boutique beer, the other uncomfortably pawing uncomforably at his bow tie. Now that’s a column.

The Washington Post’s editorial board published a piece today arguing that “Pope Benedict XVI Is Wrong on Condoms.” An understatement, sure, but I was still glad to see our newspaper of record take God’s gift to Africa down a notch. Until I got, oh, four sentences in:

In a perfect world, people would abstain from having sex until they were married or would be monogamous in committed relationships.

Now, at long last, we know what a perfect world would look like!

Nobody would have sex until they were married, except for the gays, who would never have sex ever (except while in Massachusetts and Connecticut). We would all be virgins until we caved and got married too young so we could have sex finally, only to figure out that we didn’t really like our spouses enough to spend all eternity with them (and also that the sex was bad). We wouldn’t get divorced, because divorce is also un-perfect. Our children would suffer, because even while married we wouldn’t be allowed to use contraception.

Take heart, sinners: Everyone who is currently having premarital sex is doing his or her part to make our world a little less perfect. Those of you who are unmarried but are “monogamous in committed relationships” are less unperfect, as long as that committed relationship is your first and it ends in a marriage which ends in death.

Thanks for showing us the way, Washington Post editorial board, secret agents of the Papacy!

Photo by roblisameehan

IF SHE DID RUN, HE WOULD CRUSH HER, a new poll finds [PDF]. “A new national [Public Policy Polling] poll finds that nominating Palin could be a death wish for the party, with Barack Obama leading Palin 55-35 in a hypothetical contest. The key reason Palin would lose to Obama by so much is that even though she might be the top choice for a certain segment of voters within her party, there’s also a number of Republicans who say they would vote for Obama if their party nominated Palin.” [via ThunderPig].

ALASKANS STILL LOVE HER: Palin enjoys a high approval rating in her state:

Very positive 40.5
Somewhat positive 20.8 percent
Somewhat negative 12.5 percent
Very negative 20.2 percent
Don’t know/Didn’t answer 6 percent

Her staff still sucks, though.

WHY IS GRETA V.S. SARAH PALIN’S OFFICIAL JOURNO? Greta Van Susteren has bombarded the populace with interviews with Palins big and small. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza knows why: Her husband, John Coale, is a friend of the governor:

Coale, a well-known Washington lawyer and the husband of Fox News Channel’s Greta Van Susteren, drew national media attention when he endorsed Sen. John McCain’s presidential bid in protest of the way in which Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who he backed in the primary, was treated. Coale, in an interview with the Fix, described himself simply as a “friend” of the Alaska governor but acknowledged that he suggested she start a leadership PAC and helped her navigate through some of the questions surrounding her family that lingered after the campaign. Others familiar with Palin’s political team insist that Coale has far more power than he is letting on—essentially helping to run Sarah PAC. Coale demurred on that front, noting only that he talks to Palin regularly and that she is a “fascinating person” who is “definitely not what the right thinks or the left thinks.”

GRETA ON WHY SHE’S A NEUTRAL PALIN REPORTER:

[via ThinkProgress]

PALIN HEADLINE OF THE DAY, from Politico’s Ben Smith: “Palin Clashes With Feds on Wolves”

MADONNA is to Hillary Clinton as Britney Spears is to Sarah Palin: “Britney is not Madonna,” writes  Spears tour reviewer Jed Gottlieb. “She just ain’t. Madonna is Hillary Clinton. She’s whip smart and survives, even thrives by adapting. And Lord knows she wants it more than anyone. Britney is Sarah Palin. Baby drama headlines. Podunk back story and a massive industry machine behind her. She’s a manufactured star aimed at the lowest common denominator.”

Photo by Kurisu

* Metro Weekly profiles two laid-off longtime Whitman Walker Clinic employees, Barbara Chinn and Pat Hawkins.

* The Post details Malia and Sasha’s first day of school at Sidwell Friends:

Usually the recommencement of classes at a private school don’t warrant breaking updates: The girls’ motorcade left the Hay-Adams Hotel for Sidwell Friends School. They arrived early! Several hours went by. Then they left!

* Slate’s Dear Prudence answers “Is it wrong to keep Viagra use a secret?” (No), and offers up some unsolicited advice as well:

I’m wondering why you feel the need for this boost. If you always require it, that’s one thing. But if it’s just insurance that you will be able to perform even though you’re feeling insecure, that’s possibly a signal that you should do less performing and more talking. If you don’t need the pill, then leave it in the bottle and see how things go naturally.

* Tiger Beatdown, in a post on Gaza, recalls “September, and the planes, and where you were, and how scared you felt, and how you kept calling people to see who was and was not okay”:

I remember being on the phone with an out-of-town friend and saying, “I’m so scared we’re going to go to war. I’m so scared that we’re going to retaliate, and that people will just keep dying.”

“Obviously, we’re going to go to war,” he said, because in a crisis what you really want to do is prove once and for all that you are smarter than the person you are talking to, “and I can’t say I disagree with that. We have to defend ourselves. When I look at the footage… anyone who could do this just isn’t human.” . . . “Everybody’s human,” was the only thing I could say at the time.

Photo via trialsanderrors.

The Bush administration today issued a sweeping new regulation that protects a broad range of health-care workers—from doctors to janitors—who refuse to participate in providing services that they believe violate their personal, moral or religious beliefs.

The controversial rule empowers federal health officials to cut off federal funding for any state or local government, hospital, clinic, health plan, doctor’s office or other entity if it does not accommodate employees who exercise their “right of conscience.”

Hey, I wonder who will make the most inane comment on this inane rule? Will it be President George W. Bush? Family Research Council President Tony Perkins? Does Sarah Palin have anything to say about this?

No, okay, let’s settle on Assistant Secretary of Health Joxel Garcia! “Many health-care providers routinely face pressure to change their medical practice—often in direct opposition to their personal convictions,” Garcia said.

Don’t you just hate it when the government comes a-knockin’ at your federally funded business which has been operating PERFECTLY WELL THANK YOU and says you change like EVERYTHING AROUND just to accommodate the constitutional rights of other people? Next they’ll be saying that bus drivers “have” to let black people ride in the front, or that poll workers “have” to let women vote. Thank you President Bush for protecting MY right to use American taxpayer’s money to deny those American taxpayers their own rights.

Wait a minute . . . based on this ruling, could a federal employee—say, I don’t know, Barack Obama—refuse to grant federal funding to one of these anti-contraception, anti-abortion medical providers based on his “right to conscience”? Something to look into!

[Also of interest: For this week's paper, I wrote a story about how pharmacists are denying birth control based on "conscience"---or, you know, whatever].

* Washington Post columnist Hank Steuver on reporters’ practices of asking straight actors about playing gay: “Wasn’t it really difficult to kiss another man? Implied: Without throwing up, seeing as you’re so obviously straight? What were you thinking as you kissed? Did you rehearse it? What was it liiiiiike?”

* According to a study by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and
CosmoGirl.com, “One in five teen girls (22%)—and 11% of teen girls ages 13-16 years old—-say they have
electronically sent, or posted online, nude or semi-nude images of themselves.” Even more teens are playing voyeur: “One-third (33%) of teen boys and one-quarter (25%) of teen girls say they have had nude/semi-nude images—originally meant to be private—shared with them.”

* Larry Craig has lost his appeal but not his appeal, am I right fellas?

* Pink News has the skinny on the first gay band asked to march in an inaugural parade: the Lesbian and Gay Band Association.

* Ladyblog calls for a soap opera bailout: “If Susan Lucci isn’t safe, no one is.”

Photo via trialsanderrors.

Kelly McEvers, who wrote a great series for Slate about her attempts—and failures—at finding pirates in the Strait of Malacca, chatted online today at the Washington Post about her experience getting the story. She had an interesting comment about the gender politics of reporting from the sea. Who has the advantage in locating swashbucklers—men or women?

Downtown DC: Hi Kelly, Interesting assignment—I love how you capture both the boredom and the rush of being on an assignment like this. Sure, I am curious why the chat is before the final segment of the story, but I guess everyone else is too. Ready for Part 5, I guess.

Sounds to me that based on your experience, a male (western) journalist wouldn’t have a chance of meeting these contacts (at least in Malaysia/Indonesia). How scared were you, really, when taken into the hold with all these guys? I am assuming it would have been different if they were in their 20s and not 50s…

Kelly McEvers: I’m not so sure that a male journalist would have had problems. See Peter Gwin’s recent piece in National Geographic about the same subject, in the same region. The pirate I eventually met was younger—not in his 50s.

But the gender question is an interesting one: I admit that being a woman makes it easier to my job sometimes. But other times it makes it hard. Especially in Muslim countries.

Arrr—it’s, a tie?

Photo by Oakley Originals.

* Tim Dickinson for Rolling Stone on why Prop 8 failed. (Hint: It wasn’t Mormon or black voters, but it might have been you).

* The Gay Recluse reports on the shielded statues in Union Station (photo above), indicates that behind the shield are uncircumcised Roman penises, calls it “the biggest scandal in the history of hot gay statues!”

* WaPo says Barry and Hills need to work on their “rapport,” but noted this cute press conference tidbit: “Leaving the news conference in Chicago yesterday where he introduced his national security team, President-elect Barack Obama strolled out of the room arm in arm with his choice for secretary of state and onetime rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton.” Oooooooh!

* Mark your calendars: Forum on gay marriage in D.C. slated for Dec. 11.

* Barrack buys Michelle First Bling!

Yesterday, the Washington Post published a story by Monica Hesse on election night hookups as pursued through Craigslist personals ads. But soft! Was it not mere hours before yesterday that I reported on election night hookups as pursued through Craigslist personal ads?

I smell blog item!

Hesse’s name is very similar to mine, which is Hess. But look further, and you will discover several subtle differences between Hesse’s piece and my own.

First, Hesse relies on the more romantic end of the Craigslist hook-up spectrum (”Missed Connections”), while mine (Hess’s) focuses on the Web site’s tawdrier offerings (”Casual Encounters”). This is no accident. Hesse’s choice belies her newspaper of record’s standards of decency, standards which are not shared by my alternative news-weekly. So while Hesse’s piece employs expressions of sexuality suitable for the reader of delicate sensibilities (”Awwww yeah”), my piece instead chooses to call a “clusterfuck” a “clusterfuck.” (”Clusterfuck” being a term that Washington Post standards prevent Monica Hesse from printing without repercussion).

But though Hesse’s piece adheres to Washington Post standards of decency, it does endeavor to break free of her newspaper’s more traditional standards of style. Hesse employs italics in order to convey the thoughts of election night participants (”Never felt that kind of euphoria . . . Out of body . . .”), ALL CAPS and irregular punctuation to express surprise (”They were drinking, chatting, hanging out, when suddenly she spotted . . . CORDUROY JACKET!!”), and italics coupled with repetition in order to build suspense (”For Obama! For Obama!”). My piece, on the other hand, has been vigorously edited to purge it of non-standard formatting, save for several carefully placed sarcastic asides.

In conclusion, people will make any excuse to convince other humans to have sex with them, then speak candidly about it to local newspapers.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

It’s day two of the Sexist’s Manliest Workplace in D.C. tournament, and things are beginning to heat up. In day one of our contest, the Washington Times positively manhandled Washingtonian Magazine, proving that its storied man-heavy organizational chart can’t fall to any old progressive employer. Today, the fight continues in the media bracket as Congressional Quarterly tests its man mettle against the Washington Post. Let the unscientific and, in fact, highly arbitrary games begin!

CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY: Congressional Quarterly sure has its share of dudes to look after. As the publication of record for Congressional goings-on, CQ covers two of the Manliest Workplace Tournament’s most promising contenders: the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. But when it comes down to its own employment record, is CQ more Ms. than GQ? And when will I begin to run out of puns relating to men? Find out below!

President & Editor-in-Chief Bob Merry (Male, 10 points)
Publisher & Senior Vice President Keith White (Male, 9 points)
Editor & Senior Vice President Michael Riley (Male, 8 points)
Executive Editor, Publications Susan Benkelman (Female, ZERO)
Executive Editor, News Anne Q. Hoy (Female, ZERO)
Executive Editor, Innovation Ken Sands (Male, 5 points)
Circulation Sales Vice President: Jim Gale (Male, 4 points)
Chief Marketing Officer: Greg Hamilton (Male, 3 points)
Chief Financial Officer: Diane Atwell (Female, ZERO)
Chief Information Officer: Larry Tunks (Male, 1 point)

Wah-Wahhhh. Scoring only a 40 out of 55 points on the manly index, CQ weighs in with a barely respectable 72 percent manliness. Around here, we call that a C minus.

—

THE WASHINGTON POST: This one could go either way, folks. When Katharine Weymouth took over publishing duties at the paper earlier this year, she reclaimed a role for women carved out by grandma Katharine Graham in the 1970s. But this 131-year-old broadsheet has its share of Marcuses, Miltons, and Boisfeuillets (dude name!) to go around. Let’s go straight to the masthead!

Chairman Boisfeuillet Jones, Jr. (Male, 10 points)
Publisher and CEO Katharine Weymouth (Female, ZERO)
Executive Editor Marcus W. Brauchli (Male, 8 points)
President and General Manager Stephen P. Hills (Male, 7 points)
Chairman of the Board Donald E. Graham (Male, 6 points)
Vice President At Large Benjamin C. Bradlee (Male, 5 points)
Vice President At Large Leonard Downie, Jr. (Male, 4 points)
Vice President of Operations Michael Clurman (Male, 3 points)
Managing Editor Philip Bennett (Male, 2 points)
Deputy Managing Editor Milton Coleman (Male, 1 point)

That comes to an impressive 46 out of 55 on the Manly Index, or roughly 84 percent manliness. For one woman, Weymouth has managed to significantly affect the manliness of a paper simply littered with Y chromosomes. For what it’s worth, we’re willing to bet she was a legacy.

—

GLASS CEILING CRACK WATCH: With three women suiting up at Congressional Quarterly and Weymouth weighing in over at the Post, our current crack count rises to a robust 12. (That’s 12 positions filled by females in the 40 positions surveyed so far in the media division)

Naughty Meanspirited Awesome: They didn’t stand a chance. In last week’s Date Lab, Washington Post’s resident sadists set up “Chrissy,” a 24-year old recruiter, with “Clay,” a 24-year-old farmer. Farmer and “recruiter”—a natural pairing, no?

No. By the time Clay set his eyes on Chrissy, it was clear that no Green Acres sparks would be a-flying. “She looked like a D.C. professional. And she was not fat in any way, but she was heavier than the girls I typically go out with,” he told interviewer Kelly DiNardo. Chrissy’s lifestyle was also a bit heavy for Clay. “I’ve been through the night-life thing. I did it in high school and college. Heavily,” said Clay, who, in his pre-date questionnaire, claimed to be looking for a woman like “Fergie in Black Eyed Peas,” a recovered meth addict.

When asked in a pre-date questionnaire how he is “D.C.,” Clay responded that “a farmer with a Beemer is dynamic in all environments.” When asked how he’s not “D.C.,” Clay responded, “I am a farmer.” Clay also noted that he was happiest “outside, working hard at my farm.”

Chrissy, who is not a farmer, described the remainder of the date. “He graduated with his master’s in agriculture this past May. Now he raises cattle. I’ve never even met a farmer or cattle rancher,” Chrissy said, adding, “I said on my Date Lab questionnaire that I wanted a cowboy, but I was doing that tongue-in-cheek.” Clay countered, “Women like the idea of a cowboy. A cowboy wears a cowboy hat every day. I’m not cool enough to wear a cowboy hat every day. I’m more of a farmer.”

Date Lab notes that “The daters don’t plan to see each other again.” It does not, however, record the number of inter-office high-fives received by Date Lab’s mail opener on the date Clay’s application rolled in. Thanks for taking one for the team, Chrissy.

Nice: XX Files’ “Hot for Hillary,” an essay by self-described “woman of a certain age” Mary Burgan. The title, which makes little sense, Burgan describes her experience working the phone banks during the Clinton campaign—and enduring her husband’s Obama support. “I felt a pull of loyalty, for despite my concerns about her lack of spontaneity and the dullness of her stump speech, I believed that she would be the last and most credible woman in my lifetime with a shot at being president,” wrote Burgan. “Actually, I was a bit surprised to discover how much that meant to me and how angry I could get at men who didn’t see the matter’s extreme importance.”

Burgan allows herself to inject some humor into that premise, though, making a killer Cash Cab joke and several old folks jabs along the way. In the essay, Burgan displayed a certain social grace that Jezebel’s Moe Tkacik found missing from the rheteric of some die-hard Hillary supporters. There was only one point of strangeness in the text, when Burgan says a fellow volunteer at the phone bank told her “There’s a special hell for women who don’t help women.” What, no Palin/Starbucks joke follow up? You’re showing your age, Burgan.

But if the prose doesn’t convince you, Burgan’s mug might:

I love this woman.

* The Washington Post Magazine yesterday detailed the storied law office romance of Michelle and Barack Obama. Even with my hard, unfeeling heart, I managed to read this . . . almost all the way though. Here’s the engagement story:

[Michelle] began to pressure Barack to get married . . . Barack put her off, arguing that marriage was a meaningless institution and that the only thing that mattered was how they felt about each other. Michelle, whose parents had been married for some 30 years, wasn’t buying it.

Then, one night in 1991, he took her to Gordon, an expensive Chicago restaurant, and she started to press him again. He went into his usual tirade against marriage, a dissertation that went on until they ordered dessert. When it came, the plate had a box on it, and in the box was an engagement ring.

“‘That kind of shuts you up, doesn’t it?’” Michelle remembers Barack telling her.

Plus this strange tidbit about Michelle’s early legal work:

The group went out of its way to give Michelle work suited to her interests. When an opportunity came in to handle the budding public television career of Barney, the purple dinosaur poised to become a phenomenon among American children, Goldstein says he and others felt it had Michelle’s name written all over it.

* Sarah Palin reserved her very own place in Hell on Saturday. At a California rally, Palin (poorly) recited a quote from Madeline Albright in an attempt to re-affirm the “feminist” angle of her campaign. The speech began with an endorsement from L.A. National Organization for Women president Shelly Mandel, which I can only imagine is the way Andy Kaufman has chosen to tell us all that he’s still alive. But don’t worry, Palin didn’t get the quote from her extensive research of Clinton-era foreign policy; she got it from Starbucks:

I’m reading on my Starbucks mocha cup, okay? The quote of the day… It was Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State [crowd boos] and UN ambassador. Now she said it, I didn’t. She said, ‘There’s a place in Hell reserved for women who don’t support other women.’ [Crowd approval] . . . OK, now thank you so much for receiving that well—I didn’t know how that was going to go over . . . And now California, let’s see what a comment that I just made how that is turned into whatever it’ll be turned into tomorrow in the newspaper.

I’m not sure that newspapers can really be blamed for twisting Albright’s Starbucks’ Palin’s words, which barely make sense on the level of the sentence. More confusing than the actual speech, though, is that the crowd first boos Albright, then cheers her words when filtered through the finely calibrated Starbucks-Palin machine.

* Last summer, the New York Observer found New York City’s hottest transsexual woman, super fox Jamie Clayton. Now, Logo’s got the first Clayton video interview: [via Gawker]. Clayton talks about “blending in” and New York guys’ pick-up lines.

* Tina Fey is Palin; Queen Latifah is Gwen Ifill:

Plus, why some are amused, confused, by Fey’s success at Palin’s faults: “Wow, she really looks like Tina Fey. Tina Fey has been doing a great job parodying her. Boy, I love Tina Fey. Ack, but I don’t love Sarah Palin. Nononononononono! Bad mental association. Bad.” [via Feministe].

Photo by DanieVDM

* Yesterday’s Washington Post date lab, attached Michaeleen plays games with single Steve. “I never did the whole date-lots-of-people thing when I was younger. The man I am seeing is out of town, so he doesn’t know about Date Lab,” says Michaeleen. “I am going to tell [him]. I do believe in being honest and up front.” Two weeks later, Michaeleen’s boyfriend was still in the dark about Michaeleen’s WaPo-funded dinner date. Until now!

* Once but a blog, now a full-fledged ‘zine: The second issue of local fashion/lifestyle magazine panda head is available today.

* Brightest Young Things on last week’s All-City Air Guitar Competition at Wonderland: Fenders replaced with cut-off shorts, DIO shirts, and tighty-whities.

* Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds make it official in a Canadian wedding.

* Tina Fey reprises her role as Sarah Palin on “Saturday Night Live”; Amy Poehler takes on Katie Couric:

Judging local takes on sex and gender.

What a week to launch a new sex and gender blog. Since Sunday, The Washington Post’s Style Section has been going balls out on its trad. values coverage with “Wedding Week 2008.” Whether you’ve feasted from the Post’s Wedding Week buffet or merely dipped your finger in its room-temperature hollandaise sauce, The Sexist has your guide to what coverage catches the bouquet and what pieces are so homely they might never find a man who could ever love them.

Naughty: Rachel Beckman’s “One Ring Circus.” This piece is your typical girl meets boy, girl falls for boy, girl spends several years waiting for boy to ask her to love him until they die, girl converts her workplace into an “Engagement Watch” bitching den until she finally wears boy down enough to propose to her type of story. In other words, a success!

Beckman, a former City Paper writer, spends the piece struggling to align her “feminist” side with her “princess” side. “I was caught in a Catch-22,” writes Beckman. “I could be hands-off and leave it all to him (feminist Rachel says no), or I could be hands-on and get what I want (princess Rachel says no).”

Let me make it easy for you, Beckman: You’re a pretty, pretty princess.

For the sake of the story, though, let’s imagine that, by virtue of picking up Bust Magazine a few times in college, Beckman is, like, a totally liberated woman beneath that frilly exterior. Beckman’s idea of compromise between the feminist and the princess is to coerce her boyfriend to propose to her how she wants it, when she wants it, and with the appropriate cut of diamond—but to maintain the artifice that he is running this entire show in order to preserve what she calls the “purity” of the engagement.

Years ago, these sort of behind-the-scenes marriage machinations might have been seen as clever tricks for women to transcend patriarchal control in order to get what they want. But this is Wedding Week 2008, Beckman!

If a “pure” union requires a woman to kill herself in order to make it appear as if her “man” is making all the decisions and that she agrees to every one of them, consider me the piss stain in the freshly fallen snow of modern marriage.

Nice: After that, Caitlin Gibson and Rachel Manteuffel’s “The Anti-Wedding” reads positively radical. Gibson and Manteuffel’s piece—their attempt to deliver a “Fuck You” to the marriage industry by planning the nuptials of a wedding-averse alterna-couple—is largely a pleasant romp through the tedious wedding-making machine. Still, I can’t help but see this piece as token “Other” coverage in an entire week of features that pander to the wedding industry. Just how Anti-Wedding is this wedding anyway?

Nontraditional:
- wedding occurs not in church but in street
- bride wears red summer dress
- service marred by miserable, miserable rain
- guests brandish signs reading “‘Til Debt Do Us Part” and “Money Can’t Buy Me Love”
- no rings exchanged
- in place of champagne and cake, beer and pizza consumed

Traditional:
- requires two wedding planners
- union between man and woman
- photo shoot printed in national newspaper
- couple still fucking getting married

Photo by Darrow Montgomery.

* On Slate, Dahlia Lithwick serves Joe Biden with some rules on how to fight a girl. Lithwick, a former parliamentary debater (side-note: totally awesome), gives Biden a frank run-down on how not to lose the Veep debate to Governor Palin. Most of the advice is fine—don’t leer, don’t condescend, don’t stoop—until Lithwick slips from the particular Biden/Palin scenario to a generalization about all male/female match-ups.

When Lithwick writes that her “insanely successful college debate friend told me recently that the way he won against women was by always behaving like they were men,” the implication is that minus their feminine wiles—the lipstick on their pit bulls—women will lose. After a long explanation of why Biden shouldn’t respond to Palin with Palin tactics, Lithwick’s kicker—”My best advice to you for dealing with Gov. Palin? Fight like a man. She will.”—is both confusing and lame. Who’s the man what now?

* The Washington Post marches boldly on with their “Wedding Week” coverage. At 1 p.m. today, join the authors of The Bridal Wave: A Survival Guide to the Everyone-I-Know-Is-Getting-Married Years for a live online chat. Ask Erin Torneo and Valerie Cabrera Krause how people who desperately wish they were married manage to be more tragic than the people who actually publicly declare how they’re going to love each other forever in front of everyone they know. Including their parents.

* Wait, coverage of marriage issues that doesn’t include pandering to the wedding industry? The Blade tips you off to a panel discussion on marriage rights in California and Massachusetts, tonight at 6:30 at the University of California Washington Center. UCWC is located at 1608 Rhode Island Avenue NW.

* The New Gay chronicles the “hidden history” of the women behind the writings of Victorian author Michael Field.

* Via Wonkette: Michelle dances with Ellen. Possible next First Lady jam: Rihanna’s “Don’t Stop the Music.” Last year, Barack got down to Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love.” Umm, I only watch Ellen when an Obama is on the show, does she make everyone do this?

Photo by NCinDC.